First day

I'm excited to meet the new students.  The first day means I don't know my audience yet, so I have to think about the course in a new way, trying to anticipate the best way to introduce the subject.  It's a little bit of a challenge (it's sometimes easier to have a conversation when you have a lot of subject matter in common), but it's also a great way to deepen and think through things in a new way.

It occurs to me for the first time today (a "duh" moment) that this is one of the very cool values of the academy, of higher education: you have teachers re-formatting and revising their understanding of the material every semester.  In fact, we have a derogatory joke, a cliched image, of the teacher who lectures from his old, yellowed notes every semester.  Nothing new, nothing surprising happens.  No wonder colleges are the places we make knowledge: everyone there is a newcomer semester after semester, even the most seasoned professor (unless he actually lectures from old, yellowed notes).

Colleges are not just places where knowledge is trotted out, old die-hard facts and truisms.  They can be that sometimes, but also places where what we know is challenged.  I have a picture in my office that says "It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it" (Jacob Bronowski).  I think that is a very important way to look at rhetoric, too: it's a matter of questioning, opening inquiry, not codifying facts <yawn>.  I'm excited.